19 August 2012

The Incredible Lightness of Biden

"Say it ain't so, Joe!"

If choosing Joe Biden to be his Vice-President has been President Obama's "single, best decision," how on earth would he expect us to describe the rest of his decisions?

Unlike Biden, I'm at a loss for words...

- Sophie

By John Podhoretz

Everyone, who has done time in Washington politics or media, has a Joe Biden story, and every story is pretty much the same. Here's mine:

A quarter-century ago, Sen. Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, then in
his third term, came in for a lunch with a few editors and reporters at
the newspaper where I worked. Its editor welcomed Biden and asked him a
question about whatever story was at the top of the news agenda that
day.

Biden started talking. And talking. And talking. He spoke and
he gesticulated. He wandered off into secondary subjects, and secondary
subjects of the secondary subjects.

He conjured up a memory of his
childhood, and then told a tale from his first campaign.

After 20 minutes without so much as a breath, it was clear to me and
others around the table that there was something wrong — that our guest
simply did not know how to conclude his peroration.

We shifted in
our chairs. Someone coughed. Someone else sighed. The door loomed behind
us, tormenting us with the blessings of an escape we simply could not
make.

It was not until 45 minutes after he had begun that Joseph
I. Biden simply ran out of gas. He came to no conclusion, no closing
thought. He just stopped talking, looked down, and at last took a bite
of food and drank some water.

I had never been through anything
like it. Biden had displayed a literally clinical display of logorrhea, a
term Google defines for me as “pathologically incoherent, repetitive
speech.”

That condition has never gone away. On April 3 of this
year, Biden appeared at a high school in Norfolk, Va., where he was
asked a question about gas prices.

“I’m going to give you a brief answer,” he said. “I’m going to give it to you as quick and as straight as I can.”

He
then proceeded to speak . . .

... for 11 minutes.

You can watch the video.
It’s a little bit like watching Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man.” Biden
walked back and forth, making little eye contact with the audience, as
his thoughts poured out of his mouth. Going on. And on.

He spent
decades in the Senate doing just this, which was permissible since there
are no limits imposed on the amount of time a senator may speak. In her
book, “The Obamas,” Jodi Kantor tells a story about Barack Obama, in
the first of his three years in the Senate, listening to an endless
Biden oration. The future president scribbled a note to an aide. It
said:

“Kill. Me. Now.”

So why did Obama choose Biden as his running mate? And why is he keeping Biden on as his running mate?

The
question naturally arises as a result of Biden’s preposterous and
offensive performance on Tuesday, in which he likened the rival ticket’s
views of how best to regulate Wall Street with the reimposition of
slavery (“They’re gonna put y’all back in chains”).

In a very
close race, Biden’s inability to control his own tongue poses a threat
to Obama’s chances — simply by virtue of his ability to throw the
campaign off course and into the thicket of an unnecessary controversy,
even for a day.

The point is, that danger was predictable from the
get-go:

If Obama wanted someone to put him out of his misery listening to
Biden in 2005; why did he choose to subject the nation to it in 2008?

First,
Biden was chosen in 2008 because, for whatever reason, President Obama
did not want to make the obvious choice: Hillary Clinton. The president
had the same choice this year and chose again not to make it.

(And
for those who say changing running mates in midstream would smack of
desperation, there would be a ready answer: Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
his role model, ran and won with three different VP candidates in four
elections.)

Second, it’s said that Biden was the choice because of
his experience. As Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post noted, “a pick
designed to shore up the Illinois senator’s foreign policy credentials
in advance of the November election against John McCain.”

OK, but Biden’s own foreign-policy credentials — then and now — were and are highly problematic, to put it mildly.

In
2008, he was best known for an utterly cockamamie proposal that the
United States should have divided Iraq into three countries after the
war concluded. And during the Obama administration, he has become best
known for enunciating a peculiar view of Afghanistan according to which
the Taliban “per se is not our enemy.”

An interesting opinion, given
that we’ve been at war with the Taliban for a decade — a war that Barack
Obama chose to broaden considerably in 2009.

Biden also opposed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

One
is forced to conclude that Obama chose Biden because he wanted a
running mate who would have no independent standing whatever.

In
the end, Biden was and remains a pol from a small state who had never
gotten more than 165,000 votes in an election in his life, who came
across to those who knew him as a garrulous coot at best and as a
solipsistic bore at worst, and who would represent no particular
constituency in Obama’s party that would seek to influence the
president.

He’s a time suck, as I learned 25 years ago. Unfortunately for the president, Joe Biden might also be a time bomb.